Technology in Hospitality

I think a very visible observation at this year's Restaurant Show was logical tech instead of theoretical. There was less "glimpses into the future" and more "proof of concept." Here's one of those in action: For two and a half years, Wingstop has worked on a new Smart Kitchen that forecasts demand in 15-minute increments, telling the store how many wings to drop. The system takes into account more than 300 variables tailored to each unit, like weather, sales trends, and sports. It also features digital touch-screen displays at every work station instead of paper chits and an order-ready screen at the front so consumers can keep up with their order. Another feature: there are now sticker print outs that identify what flavors are in each package. At restaurants where the technology has been installed, wait times have been cut in half to about 10 minutes, and there have been notable improvements in guest satisfaction, accuracy, consistency, and employee turnover. In the delivery channel, Wingstop has been able to show up in under 30 minutes. Why is this important? Shorter wait times allow the brand to become a greater consideration. Instead of serving as a destination—with an average frequency of just three times per quarter and once a month—the quicker service could entice guests to visit more often, especially during on-the-go periods like the afternoon daypart. The Wingstop Smart Kitchen is in 400 restaurants and the chain hopes to complete the rollout by the end of the year. Again, real-time innovation in the back of the house. That seems to be the battleground right now. More here: https://lnkd.in/eMHMUkmZ

We almost deployed this system at IKEA. Would have tracked everything: customer flow, queue times, employee movement, table turnover at the restaurant. Cost killed it. But watching CCTV footage from a cafe using this tech yesterday made me realize we dodged something bigger. Here's what these systems DO brilliantly: - Optimize queue flow (cut wait times) - Map customer movement (spot confusing layouts, find hot spots) - Identify bottlenecks (process problems, not people) - Smart staffing decisions (based on real patterns) Here's where it goes WRONG: - The second you measure "coffees per hour" per barista, you've shifted from operational intelligence to surveillance culture. Those speed metrics miss everything that matters: The regular who needs 30 seconds of conversation. Complex drinks that take time. Training moments with new staff. The human interactions that BUILD loyalty. Research shows this pattern clearly: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (Goodhart's Law). Use these systems for operational intelligence. Track patterns. Optimize flows. Improve experience. But tie it to individual KPIs? You just told your team speed matters more than the moment. And moments build brands. What's your take - where's the line between smart operations and surveillance?

The Rise of AI in China's Culinary and Delivery Industry: A Double-Edged Sword 🤖🍲 In China, we are witnessing a revolutionary shift with robots replacing chefs and AI taking over food delivery services. While these innovations bring undeniable benefits—faster service, consistency, and reduced human labor—they also pose a series of challenges that must be addressed: 1. Job Displacement: The widespread use of AI and robots may lead to job losses, especially for those working in kitchens or delivery services. How do we balance innovation with job security? 2. Ethical Concerns: Relying on AI for food preparation and delivery raises questions about accountability and the ethical use of technology. Who is responsible when something goes wrong? 3. Quality Control: While robots ensure consistency, they may lack the creativity and intuition that human chefs bring to the table. Can AI truly replicate the art of cooking? 4. Tech Dependency: Over-reliance on technology could make businesses vulnerable to cyber threats or system failures, disrupting services. As we embrace AI and robotics in food production and delivery, it’s crucial to consider the broader impact on employment, ethics, and quality. What are your thoughts on this shift? How can we strike a balance between technology and human touch? #AI #RobotsInBusiness #Innovation #TechnologyChallenges #FoodIndustry #Sustainability

I can't be the only one who's noticed... Kiosks have seemingly popped up in every restaurant. From local chains to roadside rest stops I'm ordering via touch screens as often as I'm speaking to someone. With restaurants reevaluating ways to enhance the customer experience and boost efficiency, kiosks offer a way to blend tech with a personal touch. Here’s why more brands will be taking a fresh look at kiosks for 2024 Adoption & Results: - Shake Shack: Over half of in-restaurant sales now happen via kiosks - El Pollo Loco: Testing shows reduced labor hrs and high consumer adoption - Yum Brands: Kiosks in 40% of KFCs, all Taco Bell US locations, and 70% of Habit restaurants Benefits: - Higher avg tickets and improved margins - Labor redeployment reduces the need for FOH order-taking - More opps to leverage customer data for personalized experiences Consumer Preferences: - 42% of diners have used kiosks; reasons include no rush to order (44%), ease of menu exploration (41%), and full menu visibility (40%) - Guests spend more time ordering with less stress leading to higher order values Investment & Expansion: - Shake Shack: Adding more kiosks + upsell features - El Pollo Loco: Accelerated rollout planned for mid-2024 - Yum Brands: Targeting a 20-pt increase in KFC kiosk penetration by 2026 #kiosk #restaurant

What is holding back hospitality from rapidly adopting technology? HospitalityNet asked its World Panel of Hospitality Tech Experts the following question: Modern technology solutions available today have the potential to transform our industry into genuine tech and data-driven entities. Yet, the question remains: What's holding us back? Here is my take: Last year hoteliers invested in technology less than 2.75% of room revenue (STR) - compare this to 15%-20% for the OTAs. Hoteliers need to understand that only through accelerated investments in technology - cloud, mobility, AI, robotics, IoT, etc. can the hospitality industry reduce staffing needs and unsustainable labor costs, and “appease” the exceedingly tech-savvy guests and their exceedingly high tech expectations. By investing in technology, hoteliers can reduce their staffing needs and afford to pay their employees living wages, train them better and empower them to provide stellar service. What's holding us back? Reluctance to invest in technology, coming from the lack of understanding that we are serving technology-obsessed travel consumers who demand a hotel technological experience equal or better to what they have at home. The technology and data fragmentation in hospitality is another big impediment to adopting technology in hospitality. Guest data lives in multiple "data islands" that do not talk to each other: PMS, CRM, CRS, Social Media, Web Analytics, Marketing Data, and BI. Very few properties and hotel companies can boast a single view on customer data with live data feeds from ALL touchpoints with the traveler. Lack of proper education and professional development opportunities on digital hospitality technology and the latest technology innovations, trends and best practices. How many hospitality schools today teach hospitality technology courses to educate future hoteliers on the importance of technology in this tech-obsessed world? Only a few. New York University's Tisch Center for Hospitality offers “Current and Future Hospitality Technologies” graduate course since 2019, which I am privileged to teach. Antiquated accounting in hospitality treating most cloud and SaaS tech applications as Sales, General and Administrative Expenses, and not amortizible capital expenses. And finally, we have become an industry of buzzwords and flashy gadgets, Not investments in a well-thought out tech stack, but singular flashy tech applications in the hope of impressing guests, owners, and investors. Ex. Robot butler by a property without CRM technology and 7-year old website. Well, whether some hoteliers like it or not, the hospitality industry is moving from low-tech and high-touch to high-tech and high-touch. But what kind of high-touch? Fewer, well-trained and well-paid employees using technology to provide stellar service. Service, which currently the poorly paid and trained employees, overwhelmed by labor shortages and mundane, repetitive tasks simply cannot provide.

TikTok just rolled out a feature that could disrupt the whole hospitality industry. Meet TikTok Go: The first major step toward social platforms becoming full-fledged booking engines. We've been saying it for years, social media has become the primary discovery engine for modern travelers. 81% of travelers use social for travel inspiration. Gen Z and millennials aren't starting on Booking.com or Expedia - they're scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, getting inspired by content. But until now, there's been massive friction in the discovery-to-booking journey. A potential guest discovers your property on social media, gets excited, wants to book, but then has to click through your profile, find your website, navigate to booking pages, and enter dates. At each step, you lose potential guests. But TikTok Go changes this completely. Here's how it works: Eligible creators can partner with hotels to create content and earn commissions when that content drives bookings. Users can now book hotels directly inside TikTok through a Booking.com integration. Each participating hotel gets a dedicated landing page showing prices, amenities, reviews, nearby attractions, and related TikTok videos. This is a fundamental shift creating several massive advantages: 1. Seamless Discovery-to-Booking: Guests inspired by your content can book immediately, eliminating the friction that kills most social media conversions. 2. Potentially Better Attribution: For the first time, we could have clear tracking from social content to actual bookings, solving the attribution blindspots that have plagued social media ROI calculations. 3. Creator Economy Leverage: You can tap into established creator audiences without building your own following from scratch. The program is already active in Indonesia and Japan, now rolling out across the U.S., with plans to expand beyond hotels into food, wellness, and other local services. We're witnessing social media platforms taking their first major step toward overtaking OTAs. The exact mechanics will evolve, but the change has been set in motion. Every major shift in hospitality creates a brief window where early adopters capture outsized returns. Websites in the 90s. Mobile booking in the 2010s. Social commerce in the 2020s. The hotels building serious social media followings today will be best positioned when these booking features become standard across all platforms. While most properties post occasional content and hope for the best, smart operators are treating social media as their primary guest acquisition engine. TikTok Go is just the beginning. What are your thoughts?

The world’s wealthiest guests aren’t chasing Michelin, they’re chasing melatonin. By 2028, the global sleep economy will exceed $585 billion. And yet, most hotels still sell bad nights wrapped in expensive sheets. We’ve mastered stimulation: high-energy bars like The Aubrey Group at Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong. To free-flow brunches at Nobu Hospitality. But the future of luxury isn’t about staying awake. It’s about helping people switch off. Because sleep isn’t downtime. It’s design time. It’s when the body repairs, the mind declutters, and your guest’s emotional connection to the brand is quietly written into memory. --- Beyond the Mattress: The Sleep Intelligence Era The world’s leading hotels are no longer investing in beds. They’re investing in biological design systems. 1. Adaptive Sleep Architecture Next-gen suites use non-contact radar to read micro-movements, breathing, and heart rate, adjusting mattress zones, lighting, and temperature in real time. At Equinox and Zedwell Hotels, ambient sensors lower blue light and boost air ionisation as the guest’s body cools toward REM. It’s not smart tech, it’s sentient design. 2. The Pre-Sleep Bar Move beyond the welcome drink. Offer a nightly ritual: amino-rich tonics, magnesium teas, and adaptogenic elixirs that prepare the body for rest. At Legacy Mekong, our “Root-to-Root” tonics use local herbs for emotional recalibration, relaxation, clarity, or release. Sleep begins before the pillow. 3. Data-Driven Rest Imagine a morning report delivered with breakfast: “7 hrs 42 mins rest, 22% more deep sleep than average.” Hotels can now track and visualise recovery using radar sensors and anonymised AI dashboards, turning invisible comfort into visible value. The result: measurable well-being, not perceived comfort. 4. Emotional Design Train staff to calibrate energy, not temperature. The best turn-down service isn’t a chocolate. It’s a room that exhales with you, dimming light, slowing tempo, syncing tone. Empathy is the new engineering. 5. Post-Stay Sleep Continuity The most advanced brands now extend the sleep journey beyond checkout, delivering personalised sleep-kit shipments (pillow scent, tonic blends, soundtracks) to recreate the brand’s circadian signature at home. The night never ends. It follows you. --- Closing thoughts: True luxury isn’t about what keeps guests awake. It’s about what lets them let go. We live in an age of cognitive overload, constant input, no release. That’s why the rarest luxury today is rest without effort. A night without interruption. A morning without fatigue. Hotels that master this will own the next decade of loyalty, because when you give someone the best sleep of their life, you don’t just win a guest. You win their subconscious. --- Your input: What's the best night's sleep you've ever had at a hotel? #LuxuryHospitality #SleepEconomy #ExperienceDesign #WellnessHospitality #EmotionalDesign #QuietLuxury #HotelInnovation #GuestExperience

Boom is a two-year-old AI-powered hospitality management platform whose latest funding round is a shot across the bow for every CXM platform with a foot in hospitality. The Bay Area-based company just raised $12.7 million to weave AI into the operational fabric of hotels. If you recall, Medallia started with Hilton as its first customer, so this is a particularly interesting story to follow. Boom isn't offering a chatbot in the lobby. On the contrary, they're promising conversational AI, hyper‑personalization, and predictive analytics that can learn, adapt, and autonomously manage complex tasks. Why does this matter for Qualtrics, Medallia, Sprinklr, and every other CXM vendor with hospitality clients? Because the data plumbing and decision‑making layers are moving deeper into the hotel. They're not going to live on a dashboard or inside a GenAI capability that a hotel manager uses to automatically generate a response to a low-NPS guest. This stuff will go by the way of the dodo bird. Imagine what this could look like: At Hilton, their Watson‑powered concierge “Connie” (now nearly 10 years old) answers questions about amenities and local restaurants. With Boom's AI capability, Connie could remember your running route from your last stay, pre-book your gym slot, and push a personalized offer through your loyalty app before you even unpack. Marriott Hotels has tested in‑room voice assistants that let guests control lighting and temperature. Layer predictive analytics on top, and the system could anticipate when you typically request room service, ask if you’d like your favorite snack delivered, and feed that behavior back into Qualtrics or Medallia for real‑time NPS tracking if you're into that sort of thing. Here’s how hospitality brands can turn this technology into magic: Connect your feedback loop. Integrate AI‑driven interactions with your CXM platform so every guest preference and sentiment automatically informs product and service tweaks. Train employees to be AI translators. Your staff should know how to interpret AI signals and add the human touch, whether it’s a concierge upselling a spa package or a manager smoothing out a glitch. Pilot, then scale. Start with a single property or service (e.g., check‑in) and use tiger teams to refine the experience before rolling it out chain‑wide. Frankly, I think Boom is ripe for a CXM provider looking for a nice tuck-in acquisition to boost their action-focused future and valuation. Because the future is not about delivering thermometers. The future is about enabling action at scale. Boom’s vision hints at a future where hotel stays feel bespoke at scale. If you were running Hilton or Marriott’s CX program, what’s one AI‑driven experience you’d implement tomorrow? #customerexperience #hospitality #ai #futureofwork #cxm #saas

McDonald’s installed self-order kiosks to create a behavioural engine. The design is clever. The oversized food imagery is expected. The labour savings are obvious. But the micro-pauses - that’s the part that impressed me. Those tiny delays are intentional. Slow the customer down… Increase time on screen… Boost impulse decisions. And it works. Kiosks create the perfect environment for silent revenue growth through endless customisation, “value” bundles with higher margins, upsells built into every step, and visual hunger triggered on cue. The operational impact is just as powerful: Fewer staff needed Faster throughput Higher order accuracy Lower training and labour costs Even the controversy helped. People debated kiosks online for months, and that noise turned into free marketing. McDonald’s has turned ordering into a data-driven system where every hesitation, skip, and tap shapes the next version of the menu. This is behavioural design meeting machine intelligence. And it’s a reminder for every brand: The smallest interaction (sometimes just a few milliseconds) can change the entire customer journey.

Zomato faced a big problem: How can we turn app browsers into loyal customers? The goal was clear, improve the user experience with personalized restaurant suggestions. But there were a few challenges too: 🔴 Understanding user preferences from massive data. 🔴 Combining multiple data sources for meaningful insights. 🔴 Developing accurate recommendation algorithms. 🔴 Processing data in real time to keep users engaged. 🔴 Building trust in the recommendations to ensure they felt helpful, not intrusive. To tackle this, Zomato used a structured approach: 🟢 Data Collection and Cleaning - They collected user behavior data (searches, clicks, abandoned carts). - They analyzed restaurant details (cuisine types, delivery times, ratings). - Past orders were also analyzed for trends. 🟢 User Segmentation - Users were grouped based on age, location, past orders, and browsing habits. - This helped them identify patterns and preferences. 🟢 Developing the Recommendation System - Combined collaborative filtering (what others like you prefer) and content-based filtering (what matches your past orders). - Fine-tuned algorithms with ongoing testing for better accuracy. 🟢 Implementation and Testing - They rolled out the recommendations and tested them through A/B experiments. - Adjusted based on user feedback and data performance. 🟢 Continuous Improvement - Introduced feedback loops for real-time adjustments. - Regular updates ensured the system stayed relevant to evolving user needs. And, the impact was impressive: ⬆️ 35% more time spent on the app by users receiving personalized suggestions. ⬆️ 28% higher click-through rates, showing better engagement. ⬆️ 22% increase in orders per user per month due to tailored suggestions. ⬆️ 18% boost in retention rates, turning occasional users into loyal customers. ⬆️ 12% higher average order value, leading to revenue growth. ⬆️ 15% jump in monthly revenue, proving personalization works! I see this as the perfect example of using data to deepen customer relationships. It's not just about the tech—it’s about understanding people and making their experience smoother and more personal. 📊 Data is the secret to building trust and loyalty. What do you think? Can other industries learn from Zomato’s success? How can personalization improve your industry? #zomato #deepindergoyal